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Meet Karl Ove Knausgaard, the literary world's latest hero

Three reasons why you should read this man’s book: It’s the literary sensation of the year, reinventing the autobiographical novel; half his family no longer speaks to him because of it; one reader hated it so much he started a fire in a bookshop in protest. Hermione Eyre travels to Sweden to meet Karl Ove Knausgaard, the reclusive author behind this summer's must-read.

Ystad, on the south coast of Sweden. Seagulls call; wheatfields stretch inland. Whizzing past on the train, I am on my way to interview the latest Scandinavian sensation, the cult literary hero and international bestseller Karl Ove Knausgaard. My Struggle, his compulsive, self-eviscerating six-volume autobiographical novel, which Zadie Smith famously needs ‘like crack’, was a publishing phenomenon in Norway, unfolding ‘live’, almost in real-time; the English-speaking world is just catching up with the translation of volume three, Boyhood Island. It’s essential summer reading, worth starting with volume one, A Death in the Family, a car-crash confessional told with Proustian poise.

Waiting on the platform, tall and conspicuous, wearing round Ray-Bans, is Karl Ove, 45. I feel I can drop the Knausgaard. I already know him, don’t I? I know he sometimes sleepwalks, stamping on the fox he believes has got inside his duvet. I know about the births of his children, the death of his father. I know that, lovelorn, he slashed his face with a razor. I know he doesn’t enjoy interviews (‘What a load of shite this is,’ he thinks during one) and that flattery makes him sick: ‘There is no worse fate than praise.’

But when I meet him, he is a stranger: reticent, polite, guarded. His written voice has a stern intensity, but in person he is softer, his movements are slow and graceful, and he drives carefully, only recently having passed his test. His silver hair whips in the wind.

‘There is an ancient stone circle by the sea here,’ he says. ‘You stand there and you can see 360 degrees, just sea and sky.’ I imagine him there, fulfilling his ‘intense need’ for solitude. ‘The stone circle is small,’ he explains. ‘A bit like This is Spinal Tap, the miniature Stonehenge.’ He says ‘Tap’ with a clipped accent, like ‘top’. We laugh, me with relief. I thought he had a sense of humour — how else could you call your largely mundane personal experiences My Struggle? — but his laughter is freer than I expected. As we pass his local fire station he says deadpan: ‘They invited me to join them. To dress up and help put out fires. Maybe I should. It might help me to do some male bonding.’

Living in Sweden is a relief after the glare of attention in Norway, where 450,000 copies have sold so far — one for every nine adults in the country. ‘Here, people know who I am, but they don’t care. In Norway, people are looking at me, pretending not to look, waving from the other side of the road, calling out… The thrill is that it’s a book that is causing all this fuss.’

It was condemned when it first came out. ‘As something almost demonic, a ruthless, heartless book,’ he says. Someone even set fire to the ‘K’ section of a bookshop in Malmö. ‘That was really funny,’ he exclaims. ‘I told my children and they didn’t like the sound of it, and my wife was concerned there was a maniac about, but I thought it was really fantastic. The best part was his motivation. He told the police: “This is the baddest novel ever!” ’

And so the buzz began. ‘Three things helped,’ he says. ‘The first was the title.’ (In Norwegian My Struggle, Min Kamp, was a shockingly overt reference to Hitler.) ‘The second, that someone [his father’s family] was furious about it and didn’t want it to be published. And thirdly, the ongoing thing, which meant everyone knew I was writing at that moment, with another book about to come out. But none of this was intentional. It’s not systematic. I wrote 1,200 pages, then I thought: “This could be published. Here is a chance to do something… different.” You have some possibilities with perspective and ages on a big canvas that you don’t on a little one.’

His first wife Tonje, a journalist, made a radio programme, Tonje’s Story, in which she said he had made a Faustian pact with fame, and revealed that it was only by reading the book that she found out about how he met his new wife, the Swedish author Linda Boström, before he and Tonje were even divorced. As for his father’s side of the family: ‘We are still not talking,’ he says. ‘They didn’t like my first novel [A Time for Everything] and that was about angels, a work of fiction! No wonder they couldn’t cope with what was to come.’ He pauses. His eyes are very pale and clear. ‘It is a terrible thing to have a writer in the family.’

We have now arrived at his home, a whitewashed cottage set round three sides of a courtyard, with a beautiful garden, half-wild and sun-dappled. His children Vanja, ten, Heidi, eight, and John, six, are coming and going, jumping on the trampoline, climbing trees. He kisses his six-month-old daughter Anne and goes to make us coffee.

Karl Ove in the novels is ‘dragged down’ by domesticity; there is a hilarious set piece in volume two, A Man in Love, in which he attends a ‘humiliating and degrading’ Rhythm Time class with his eldest daughter Vanja, then an infant. ‘My own deep voice sounded like an affliction in the choir of high-pitched women’s voices… Twelve times we sang “Hi” to our friend before all the children had been named and we could move on… I swayed from side to side thinking this must be what hell was like.’ Full of lustful thoughts for the mothers, he leaves suppressing a primal scream, a Viking trapped in a society he calls ‘feminised’.

Since writing this, he has mellowed, acclimatised. ‘Now I think it’s brilliant to be with the kids, and I think it’s good for a man to be close to his children, but it takes a while to get into this role. Many years, in fact. Fatherhood is a shock,’ he says, lighting one of an endless succession of Chesterfields. ‘You didn’t know what was coming and now everything has changed. Our generation thinks: what is this insult to our freedom? I just described how it feels. Everything you are as a man is taken away from you. But you can’t talk about this in public and I think a lot of men read this and related to it. I am interested in the difference between how things are supposed to be and how they really are.’

Praise for the novels began to pour forth. ‘Then we got money, and it scared me. We never had any money before, and our lives were OK, there were things we couldn’t do, but we were fine. I never cared. When money came, I didn’t know what to do with it. I said to Linda, maybe we should give it away to Greenpeace or something, because it came from an unethical project. She just looked at me and said, “No.” ’ He smiles. The swifts call overhead. ‘Then we bought this place.’

His library and study are untidy (‘It’s really terrible’) but the books look cherished, stowed tightly on shelves. Beside his desk is a comically full ash-tray, the fullest I have ever seen. ‘The other day I smoked 60. It just happened. The day after, I thought a bit about death. I usually feel like I’m immortal. I just can’t imagine myself dead. But I’m 45, I have a baby daughter, I have to try… to stop,’ he says.

Would therapy help? ‘I would rather shoot myself than have therapy. And I don’t want anyone to touch my back, to give me a massage. No way, never. I don’t want to cross that line. It’s part of growing up in Norway in the 1970s; you don’t cry and you don’t complain. I read Freud and I’m interested in the process, but I don’t want to do it. Sometimes you want to cling to whatever’s wrong with you. Maybe your flaws and shortcomings are something you take advantage of in your writing. I’m a destructive person. Not very, but I have that in me, and for me it’s a healing thing to write. It’ll take me a year to get there and then I’ll have two days of very joyful writing, where it’s extremely satisfying. It’s like a drug when I can access the source I can only use for writing. Then when you stop writing, the destruction is back again.’

My Struggle runs to 3,600 pages. ‘I can write 100 pages and feel I’ve not written anything substantial. I like the sensation when you’re reading a novel of it being a place you can go to, with many rooms. When I was a teen I read Tolkien and loved that it was so long.’ He has learned to hold some things back — ‘to protect Linda’. A writer of poetry and short stories, she has been hospitalised in the past for manic depression. ‘She hasn’t read all the books... It’s too much. I try to minimise it.’ In the writing or in what he asks her to read? ‘Both. Just to leave her as untroubled as possible. And to protect myself, too. Because it’s so… self-occupied, is that the word? Narcissistic. And that really f***s with your identity.’

The later books, as yet untranslated into English, segue into politics. ‘I wrote about Hitler when he hadn’t done anything wrong yet. He was an artist and he was quite good. I know because I tried to paint. It’s hard…’ Why the shift in direction? ‘The big story of our time is how German culture, so exciting and powerful, with so many great writers and composers, came in one generation to be barbaric and almost destroy the world.’

His childhood in nature, as depicted in Boyhood Island, is something he wanted to give his children. ‘But everything has changed. In the winter I went back to a place where we all used to skate. It was empty. They said, “Everyone is inside playing computer games.” ’ Scandinavia is changing fast, too. ‘In Malmö, 42 per cent of people were born outside Sweden. It’s a massive change in culture. I’m interested in place, identity, localism. It’s like a big social experiment. You have to invest a lot to make immigration work. In Sweden they don’t want to admit that it might be problematic and difficult because if you talk about it, you are a bad person, evil.’

Trapped between life and art, trying to be good and honest at the same time, Knausgaard’s natural position is struggle. He is currently writing essays on art and football (‘as easy as eating, as running’), but knows he will eventually return to fiction. ‘I said no more fiction, but I can’t think of anything else I want to do. It’s hard. To sit down and write from scratch, it takes three years before you can even get started...’ His son John recently said he wanted to be a writer. ‘Why? He said, “Because you can do it without too much effort. It’s an easy thing to do.” Ha!’ The ash falls from his cigarette, the sun fades behind a cloud, and I leave Knausgaard with his intimate thoughts, shared by a million readers.

Boyhood Island is out now (Harvill Secker, £12.99). Portraits by Felix Odell.